ABSTRACT
Contemporary Italy is both the point of departure and the goal of innumerable journeys. It is the object of centuries of Wanderlust and the homeland of an increasingly mobile, affluent population. Yet this double-edged relationship with travel seems to be unequally reflected in the country's production and consumption of travel writing. In the Anglo-Saxon world, travel books are generally acknowledged to have grown dramatically in number and popularity over the last three decades.1 Strong interest for this kind of writing is also spreading among the contemporary, well travelled, Italian public, and the growing appeal of the genre is confirmed by the fact that over the last few years major Italian publishing houses have launched travel writing series and small publishers have also ventured into the field. Yet most of the material published in Italy as travel writing is translated from other languages (with a predominance of English, followed by French, Spanish and Portuguese), and very few Italian works are promoted as travel books. At first glance, then, modern and contemporary Italian travel writing is either an absent or an invisible genre.
